Center and Circumference

As a worshipper, I personally pay a lot of attention to sermon. When I sing songs in worship, my mind may wander on and off. However, when I listen to sermon, I am fully engaged with it. Since February, Sue and I have been attending to The Brooklyn Tabernacle. We like it. So far, the senior pastor, Jim Cymbala, preached most Sundays, except one. The sermons that I heard from him are mostly good. I realize that when I live my life on the weekdays, every sermon that I hear on Sunday serves me well.

Today, while I was driving, I thought about what the pastor said this past Sunday. He preached on Mark 4:35-41. I recalled what he said in the sermon about how Jesus promised the disciples to go to the other side of the lake. Why did the disciples worry about being drown in the middle of the sea? The statement “Going to the other side of the lake” is a promise, not a possibility. He said that the point of the passage is not mainly about how to deal with predicament on our way to the other side, for we will certainly get there. Rather, what we need to deal with is whether we have Jesus on our boats? Then he openly invited people to accept Jesus Christ as Lord. I thought about the promise “Going to the other side of the lake” while I was driving.

I am not saying that this is a ground-breaking interpretation of the passage. What I want to say is that every Sunday sermon nurtures a congregant like me on the weekdays. It’s my spiritual food. It doesn’t replace my own Bible reading. But the Word of God shared and preached on Sunday prepares me to encounter God in His Word while I am dealing with my ordinary living on the weekdays. A pastor’s main pastoral task is to feed His sheep (John 21). For the past few weeks, pastor Jim Cymbala did a good job. I believe he has been doing a wonderful job since he led this church.

In Living the Message, today’s devotion is named Failure to Worship, Eugene Peterson wrote,

“In worship God gathers his people to himself as center: ‘The Lord reigns’ (Ps. 93:1). Worship is a meeting at the center so that our lives are centered in God and not lived eccentrically. We worship so that we live in response to and from this center, the living God. Failure to worship consigns us to a life of spasms and jerks, at the mercy of every advertisement, every seduction, every siren. Without worship we live manipulated and manipulating lives…If there is no center, there is no circumference. People who do not worship are swept into a vast restlessness, epidemic in the world, with no steady direction and no sustaining purpose” (p. 74).

Every worship service ought to prepare the congregation to live in response to and from that Center. When we go to worship God in worship, we go there to be re-centered by the Word and the Spirit. We pray for His guidance and protection on the weekdays through the Word and the Spirit.

As a congregant, I go there to give God my attention and expect to hear the Word of God from the pastor. I am there to worship—a royal waste of time (Marva Dawn). A good, well-prepared sermon does make a difference in the life of a congregant on the weekdays. It helps me find my center. It helps me think about the center. It helps me “not lived eccentrically.”

I hope that you were not malnourished when I was on staff. I hope that I prepared you well.